Hanging with Amy 2016: Victoria's Butterfly and Butchart Gardens

For Amy's final weekend, we took the ferry over to Victoria. I'll write about the beautiful scenery in my next post, but we took so many pictures at the Butterfly and Butchart Gardens, that I figured they deserved a post all their own. We had our coats on since it was a bit chilly and cloudy outside, but we took them off immediately once we got into the humid, tropical garden.

 Butterflies everywhere!

Only once did a butterfly land on one of us. It happened to Amy as I was getting her picture. She was standing near one of the feeding areas, so there were quite a few around. After that happened purely by chance, we started trying to get them to land on us or come to our fingers, but none of them did.

The feeding areas were dominated by these big, kind of creepy looking butterflies. They have wings that look like owl eyes to scare off predators. It's a bit unnerving, actually.

We managed to get a selfie with Buddha in the background.

Pretty, pretty!

Hanging with the turtles and the macaw

 Flamingo and waterfall selfies with the obligatory Stacy near the waterfall picture.

Amy in the plants and drying the camera lens on her cell phone.

Later that evening we headed to Butchart gardens. Most people would do the Butterfly gardens on the way, which we attempted to do, but they wouldn't let us come back later on the same ticket, and we wanted to be there late for the fireworks show.

We thoroughly enjoyed walking among the seamingly endless paths of flora!

We even discovered a few things I hadn't seen last time with Oscar, like this fabulous spitting dragon fountain, a super tall redwood tree, and these shrub bears.

 Don't we look cute under all the arches?!

This is the main lookout of the gardens that shows up in all the brochures.

Amy was glad to see they require dogs to keep their owners on a leash, and I was glad to get some tasty gelato near the star fountain.

This ocean view was considerably more open than it had been the last time we were here. They've done some work to add boat tours to their list of activities.

We wandered into their Japanese garden as well but didn't get many pictures (or any that we cared about) since both Amy and I are all about the blooms.

 The dancing fountain was as beautiful as I remembered it being.

 It's lovely and mesmerizing

 We wandered a bit longer and climbed some stairs in the middle lookout of the main gardens

 Obligatory rock photo!

 Pretty pond

My phone takes neat panoramas!

And finally we found a little nook away from the crowds to just relax for a bit before heading over to the fireworks. Oscar and I had found the deer but Amy and I found the secluded bench.

 I came back after dark to check out the nighttime ambiance.

Gorgeous!

At night they light up the fountain in a variety of colors. I would have stayed longer if I hadn't needed to get back for fireworks.

Here's the one and only shot I got of the fireworks. They ask that you not take pictures, and I snuck this one at the beginning, but I realized they'd end up looking terrible anyway. The show was great (and very different from when we saw it last time), but the pictures are just a bunch of smoke. The music was Aladdin themed as well as some classical vocal stuff I'd never heard before. It's still bugging me to find out what it was from.

It was a long time before we could get out with all the crowds, so we took a few shots of the indoor garden and took our sweet time walking back to the parking lot.